a journal of research & art
Translated by Sonia Alland
This poem is not a true poem
it is a refuge for the wounded approaches of evening
for conquered partisans
a bed for rivers that are doomed
an open space for deer that contemplate the waterfall
for the men behind the walls’ saltpeter
and those trees weighed down in the album of memory.
Translated by Tess Lewis
Everything breaks, everything becomes wrinkled,
everything is defeated,
we are born to see others fall and bleed,
he flatters who calls us wisps,
but as I crumble, I will make daylight reign.
Translated by Mira Rosenthal
that color once existed here. And dust gets in./ The nests of ants and mice now totally exposed./ A moving out, an exodus. This once was home./ Once light and heat and fire. Now so much wind.
Translated by Sorcha de Brún
This day, forever framed by briny gorse / A queerness hangs in the shoreline air / Looking back to Ballythaidhg and a summer day there
By Pierre Haroche
When the world was young / Places did not exist / Earth heaven ocean / Stood side by side / In every direction / Humans lived all together…
Translated by Hiroaki Sato
The green of the cypresses being so dark. . . . The island of death, is, that, the island of poets? / The noble (poet’s) fury. Just when the evening glow enwraps the world in darkness
Translated by Anca Roncea
on the first day we were met by a dying child. basking in the sun, sitting
on a manhole cover. around, there were three other children: one with
a torn eye, one with dermatitis and an ear torn off and another very
pale, soaked in blood.
Translated by Sonia Alland and Richard Jeffrey Newman
To save me from the sea, / perhaps a verse, / perhaps some clear words, / are all I have. / Their value / is my entire life.
Translated by Niina Pollari
That spring you met with national mourning, and your capital turned gray. / You looked at your spouse in the coffin and understood
Translated by Geoffrey Brock
Behold a uniform man / behold a desert soul / an impassive mirror for the world / Sometimes I wake and join forces and possess / The rare good that grows
Translated by Kristina Andersson Bicher
I searched for a climbing tree / to fall out of. You were stepping / right into grief. Your errand / was to be overgrown. Become grief. / Cold grief. I fell. Soft / as an apple.
By Maia Evrona
Daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes: / Daughter of the world sustained / on the sweat of a back in pain; / mother of a word with wings on its feet.
Translated by Ottilie Mulzet
The crooked street darkens / the city’s diseased lungs. / Drags to its entrance gates / the one unafraid of the heavens.
Translated by Luke Hankins
children of the fog / dense fog of those eyes gazes / intersecting / the paths of meteors
Translated by Diana Thow
The only illusion is that there’s a road to follow to an end: the hallway inhabits a closed door hourly. The mystery of a dark legend buried inside a tunnel where children grow into adult visions.
Translated by Mirza Purić
Under a stolen car the world will shrink down to a single truth, and then I’ll encourage / the bullet I’d spat out into your lung.
Translated by Rachael Daum
Someday it will be enough. / I’ll write a poem, / the words will spill all over your street / and you’ll slip / and fall straight into my arms my shackles / they’re learning to be gentle / by way of drunkenness,
By Sylvia Beato-Davis
sleep without touching & in the morning, you ask what is the matter., but nothing is ever the matter until the tea kettle struggles to sing. i dig to remember the ardor of dreamlife, putting the wrapped stick of butter near the flame to melt.
By Ken White
I forget nothing / think of a curse / triple it and still / you’re nowhere near / all braids evenly divided / from earth
By Caitlin Berrigan
Even an entirety must have an edge. Just as the continents drifted before, leaving a line against water: California.
Translated by Gnaomi Siemens
All over the earth are countless creatures we can never know. / Wherever water encircles the world’s bright breast, legions /
of land-roving beasts, huge swarms of birds, crowd against / the roaring surf, the surge of the salty waves.
Translated by Todd Portnowitz
nothing but iron mouth / a chest of ash and shadow / stiff atonal mouth / and scattered limbs
Translated by Emma Ramadan
In an angel’s bed in a wool dress she sleeps / The house is cold the walls white like a dream / motionless death takes a seat / and for two weeks awaits the end of the temporary peace
Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
She is angry about being an export. She is angry that adoption agencies in sending as well as receiving countries make money off transnational adoption.
Translated by Paul Cunningham
The wolf is so small / The wolf is so very small / I see the wolf die / I don’t know what to do / I see that the wolf is on the ground / I see the wolf die / I stand beside the wolf
Translated by Susanna Nied
my fathers mother kept smoking after her stroke / one side of her face was paralyzed / she could just barely hold her lips together, they werent airtight / it must have affected the strength of her smokes / i think now
Translated by Meg Matich
I invited the biologist into my back garden / he marveled at the lightbulbs / and took to dancing like a night moth
Translated by Johannes Goransson
She covers herself in down! / defiled and stained / Roaring silk flower / jealous and yellow
Translated by Meg Matich
Ripples in the bath. You sit / naked on the tub’s ledge, feet touch bottom, / blood drips from your nose, aquiline.
Translated by Catherine Cobham
We love you, Europe. We love your art and hate your colonialist history, love your theatre and hate your concentration camps, love your music and hate the sound of your bombs
Translated by Meg Matich
wet paper / tangled in birch branches / inside the window, smoking, / a woman with red hair / says to herself: / they can’t hear me anymore
Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Rain clouds and fox traces / newly-fledged birds / a pair of rotten cherries hitting the ground / an inevitable detachment, a dry release
Translated by Todd Fredson
I dream the poem of a borderless sea / I dance a welcoming music in my skin / first ground for any home / while the hands of plenty the portly souls / weave their barbed wire
Translated by Baba Badji
Here is the Sun/ Which tightens the breasts of the virgins/ Who makes the old men smile on the green benches/ Who would awaken the dead under a maternal earth.
Translated by Baba Badji
One open prism placed at random from the thistles / and not one / reason to live
Translated by Alice Inggs
When slavery ended/ in America a slave got/ 40 acres anna mule/ to start his life with
Translated by Cole Swensen
They have the extreme, soft, palpable, tangible sensation of glimmering each with his neck plunged in a basin of water, made artificial, they look at each other, clearly apt to scurry off, they know nothing of each other, to scrutinize, they possess the fragile, fluttering, heightened, exclamatory sensation of being able to leave at any moment, whenever they want
Translated by Daniel Evans Pritchard
It was a time of infamy and lies. / The nation itself was dressed up / like a squalid clown to draw / attention away from our wound.
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen
anima of a dismantled marine among the poppies / and the eternal snows south of Kandahar anima of a banker
Translated by Angela Rodel
Your thighs – acacia / White, with a pleasant scent / Able to endure low / and high temperatures
By Elitza Kotzeva
Memories of moments from my childhood days / carefully sealed in the sarcophagus of / forlorn history / forgotten history / forbidden history
Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Two sentences, the house’s number, don’t waste them, keep them
for a black hour.
By Chris Blackman
Hope is but a greeting card, it occurs to me,
while in a cab barreling across the Triborough Bridge
and it might be important enough to get this maxim
tattooed on my neck in case I forget this simple truth
and lest ideas otherwise become more obtrusive,
more incessant, but these are just the ugly thoughts
to which I am chemically prone, when I’m feeling morbid—
By Michael Juliani
As the fishermen strangle cod
out on the wet docks our refrigerator arrives
and today is a warm sleeved gust
passing through the afternoon
a somnolent incident of pleasure
Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
I put all the little
orb-shaped worlds of glass back
in their cosmic framings, and everything becomes everything.
Translated by Erika Luckert
In her bedroom, where nobody would intrude, she imagined herself powerful, penis in hand, victor over all the rest and defying humiliation.
Translated by Dong Li
days are placid, like an olive grove
spread upon the slopes, not
too many high rises, not too much dust
or too many nouveau-riche neighbors;
Translated by Megan Matich
There are deep-cut valleys,
narrow and untraveled.
No grass grows here,
only ashy gray moss
Translated by Mirza Purić
for breakfast I’ve had
a small coniferous forest
and in it a squirrel
I pressed him on a serviette
stored him between two leaves of newspaper
Translated by James Sutherland-Smith
Crystals grown too quickly to champ with teeth
scratch throat. with narrow fingers across
canvas voiceless retrace twists and turns.
Translated by Kirkwood Adams and Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Ask: the hum of branches ringing in the body, a nervous shimmer, change inside a frequency.
Translated by Monika Cassel
The linden tree has lost all its leaves
and nothing is left of the summer but
the wish to stroke old Germany’s
head one more time
Translated by Bill Johnston
I’d like to say—to her, to both of them—
let’s lie down beneath the grass, lie in the shade
of dried-out ships, let matters of fate be left
to those plane trees, I’d like to say, look over there!
Translated by Mirza Purić
My beautiful triune people, you’re fairest
in the morning when you gush forth
from your colon-colonies
and your public transport vans
– thank you.
Translated by Mirza Purić
You’re always on the edge between two chasms, cradle-ladles,
as your limping legs laze on the wall.
There are wider spaces in you, their evening chill
callously presses your palms
as if to pierce your insides, spill into the night,
into the rivers above the roofs, into the rotten orchards of the sky.
Translated by Eliza Marciniak
Cold surfaces of mirrors stubbornly hold their form.
Beyond the looking-glass, atoms have combined
into impenetrable worlds.
I found warm newborns in the rabbit-hole.
Translated by Mirza Purić
When we wet the bed
for three nights in a row
they put a shroud
over our heads
and brought the lead
to our eyes
Translated by Mirza Purić
I’ve got all the necessary qualifications to become stateless I’ve got
an expired passport of a state which no longer exists and a birth certificate
from a city in a country no one will recognise
Translated by Mirza Purić
beggars at my door
I’m not opening
the spyhole is a safe space
a worldview
in my fridge
fungi and mould
Translated by Mirza Purić
Says
All things
When you lay them
One across the other
Make a cross
Only a man
Dropped as a perpendicular
Onto another man
By Marjorie Agosín
Suddenly,
That night became longer still.
Around us the silence turned dark as well,
An opaque hue of gray without blue.
Bewildered girls asked what had happened.
All their mothers knew to do was play with their disheveled hair.
Translated by Masha Udensiva-Brenner
I want to scream something
Into its dark, open jaws,
To bring my ear to it,
Press up against it with my tremulous heart.
Translated by Ottilie Mulzet
At the time I had no answering machine, so
I couldn’t call myself. Ludicrous, perhaps,
even morbid, how secure it made me feel to know
at any time I could hear my own voice. There is a voice, however
mechanical, which is mine.
Translated by Kelsi Vanada
love’s cry lingers incomplete like a half-articulated sneeze love is a half-sneeze cut off by another sneeze creaking a reflex scandalously i rest my skull on your sweet skull a phonograph before the sonata in C major accentuates and duplicates the cravings and increases wellbeing and exists
Translated by K.T. Billey
Gray carpet and gray chairs and
gray walls and gray table and
gray cocktail glasses
and gray fax machine and gray
door frame and gray neighbors
Translated by Derick Mattern
Once poetry was like a faithful hound
whenever I was sad he’d sense it
and come comfort me
